Afro-European Linguistic Encounters on the Lower Guinea Coast: The English Trading Posts on the Gold Coast and New World Creole Englishes

Magnus Huber 

This paper reconstructs the linguistic and sociolinguistic circumstances surrounding Afro-European encounters in and around the European trading posts of the Lower Guinea Coast and addresses the question of the contribution of early West Africa contact languages to the genesis of New World Creoles. The first section provides an overview of the history of Afro-European encounters on the Gold Coast and the early media for inter-ethnic communication that arose in trading contacts. The second section considers the possible contribution of the early English-lexicon contact languages to the development of New World Creole Englishes by considering both sociohistorical and linguistic data. It will be concluded that the English jargon in use on the Guinea Coast was not diffused to the New World. Rather, today’s Krio and West African Pidgin English are shown to be offshoots of Jamaican Creole and Gullah, introduced to Africa around 1800. [WP# 98002]